Somewhere in Toronto as I write, there’s a busy executive who might be dropping one of her kids off at karate lessons, or pitching a work project, or discussing the in-laws with her husband, or receiving oral sex from a virtual stranger under the table in a pub. To roughly 380,000 men in the GTA she is known, simply, as Saucy Sue. These men are married, too, and unbeknownst to their wives, or to Saucy Sue’s husband, they all spend a chunk of their time—often at work—flirting on a Web site called Ashley Madison, whose promotional motto is “Life is short. Have an affair.”

Saucy Sue, who won’t reveal her real name for obvious reasons, is a marketing manager living in Leaside. She found out about Ashley Madison from a steamy TV ad that she saw with her husband last summer. “We had a good laugh about the slogan,” she says. How ballsy it was, to promote adultery that way. But privately, she was kind of intrigued. “I’d often thought if the absolutely right opportunity presented itself on a business trip, or something like that, I might have taken it,” she muses. “But it’s very difficult, as a married woman, to let people know you’re open to other possi­bilities without exposing yourself to judgment.”

Not that Saucy Sue doesn’t love her husband. She does. They’ve been together for 14 years. But marriage is marriage—it can get a little flat, a touch stale, especially after the children arrive. Your man may love you, but he no longer makes you feel like a temptress, and maybe that’s a part of yourself that you miss.

One night, when her husband was working late and her pre-schooler was in bed, Saucy Sue impulsively stole a peek at Ashley Madison on her laptop. The site, which operates out of a suite of a dozen offices at Yonge and Eglinton to serve the furtive needs of married people all over North America, is easy for tentative, noncommittal visitors to browse. No need to pay, or to post a picture, or even to say much about yourself at first. Just dream up a nickname and a tag line—“yearning for more” or “lonely in bed”—maybe check a few boxes about what you’re looking for: candlelight, hot oil massage, erotic chat. Indicate whether you’re seeking a long-term or short-term affair. Browse away.

“I look good on paper,” says Sue. “I’m five foot six, 130 pounds, 33 years old. About 30 seconds after signing up, I was bombarded with multiple offers to chat. I joked with one guy about threesomes and thongs and about him delivering pizza to my house and other cliché porn scenarios. I got a rush of adrenalin from feeling sexy and witty.”

Pretty soon, Sue put up a picture of herself, evocative but blurry so that no one would recognize her, and men—“tons and tons and tons of them”—began paying to send her mes­sages. (For $49, you can buy 100 credits on Ashley Madison, with each personalized message you initiate costing five of them.) Wander through the site’s silent, beckoning crowd of 2.7 million members, and you’ll note that most of the women show their photos, whereas most of the men do not. This is odd, since the men outnumber the women by three to one. The women should be calling the shots. But it’s the men who remain shadowy silhouettes with tell- nothing names like “Fireman Bob” or “Oral Dave,” a default declara­tion apologizing for the absence of a mug shot: “Please respect my discretionary requirements.” If they choose, they will send you a key icon and invite you to see what they really look like in their “private showcase.”

Then, surprise! Out pops some soft-bellied guy holding a Blue at his cottage in Muskoka, or a man in his 60s frantically balancing on a medicine ball to prove his physical prowess. It’s like a disconcerting advent calendar. What’s behind this window? Chocolate? Or a doofus? Sometimes, the only thing men display in their private showcase is a close-up of their penis, erect and oiled, as if all this time, you’ve just been dying for a dildo that can type.

The first man that Saucy Sue agreed to meet was a Bay Street boy from the west end. (“A massive percentage” of the attractive men on Ashley Madison work in finance, she notes.) But when they finally got together for coffee, Sue found herself more attracted to her latte than her partner in sin. He made several persistent and increasingly forlorn phone calls. “In the end, I had to ‘break up’ with him,” she says. “I did a lousy job of it.”

Unlike the office, or the neighbourhood, on an Internet site like Ashley Madison, your prospects for having an affair are infinite. Even as you select one or two candidates for flirtatious little talks, dozens of other suitors are circ­ling. The queue grows. Messages, inquiries, little key icons keep winging into your mailbox like mayflies in mating season.

“I was e-mailing back and forth with another guy,” an engineer from the Annex, explains Sue, “who wrote these beautiful messages…very descriptive scenes of how our encounters might go. I agreed to meet him.” They met at the Brick Works and shared an umbrella as they walked under a gentle rain through the ravines. For Sue, the encounter was simultaneously nerve-racking and exciting. “It was like being a teenager all over again,” she says. “It was awesome. When he did finally drop his bag on the ground, turn to me and pull me close for a kiss, I could feel my knees shaking. It was sort of a jumping-off point. I had made the decision to cheat.”